Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This appears to be a solid answer - but I'm going to defer a day or two to digest it all.

One thing I will mention is that we have a full time, top notch IA/UX person working on the problem. There are several areas that we are focused on. Only one of which I described here. Another is that the current design essentially has three areas that lead to the same conversion point when I believe that most consumers are seeking out a better way to get to content. We've confirmed this with some user studies. A third area is that while we do get people to our SEO landing pages, they then quickly appear to get lost on the site and most do not make it to a conversion point. I'm not really all that concerned with the latter issue, unless there are folks who really do want to convert and find it too much of an effort to do so (too many friction points).

So off to digest.....thanks for now.

I work for a business that operates several sites that were developed a very long time ago. We've been making many different changes over the past 12-18 months to improve these sites in several different ways. One area that we've never discussed or attempted is general site structure. Its pretty obvious that when the business was started they had never heard of information architecture or usability design. To make matters worse, the internal linking strategy appears to have been link everything to everything. Well after being told that it couldn't be done - I'm getting our team to say we must focus on this, if for no other reason that to help consumers figure out how to navigate through our site.

Today we essentially have a series of category / information pages. In some cases, we hang more detailed topical content related to a category /informational page in a hub and spoke manner.  Although remember what I said about linking everything to everything. In reality there are a series of subtopics that should been designed for every category / informational area. Instead, what happened is in some cases the subtopic is integrated into the hub or category page, in other situations is hung off the page as a spoke page and in others the subtopic isn't even covered.

The plan is to standardize - each category will have 'n' subtopics (~10-12, we're still working this out). From a navigational standpoint users will be able to easily navigate both across categories as well as subtopics within a category as well as between categories within adjacent/similar subtopics. This is essentially a grid if that makes sense.

The question is this - we have some keywords that do well in SEO and many many more that do not and the trend has not been our friend. We're considering keeping the URLs of the pages associated with strong keywords the same within the nav structure, even though this might mean the URL for a spoke page will be inconsistent with the spoke page name from a different category.

I don't see any real danger for pages that either are not associated with any ranking keywords or only very weak keywords. Maybe I'm wrong.

What things should we consider in this change? We believe that this standardization should help consumers find the information they are looking for in a much more efficient manner, so page views/visit should go up. Additionally, this prepares us for category and subtopic comparison pages and other added functionality being added in a logical manner. We also think that as we add depth about a subtopic, it will be easier for us to acquire links to our site because the subtopics within a category will appeal to different websites. This is by no means a small project. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Do folks think this is a worthwhile endeavor? We've spent a lot of time cleaning up H1 tags, structure of our pages, anchor tags, page load order and speed, image caching, etc. Site structure, URL length and internal link structure are essentially what is left. Once these are done we intend to really get going on better and more organized content on our site. Thoughts?

Our website has local content specialized to specific cities and states. The url structure of this content is as follows: www.root.com/seattle www.root.com/washington When a user comes to a page, we are auto-detecting their IP and sending them directly to the relevant location based page - much the way that Yelp does. Unfortunately, what appears to be occurring is that Google comes in to our site from one of its data centers such as San Jose and is being routed to the San Jose page. When a user does a search for relevant keywords, in the SERPS they are being sent to the location pages that it appears that bots are coming in from. If we turn off the auto geo, we think that Google might crawl our site better, but users would then be show less relevant content on landing. What's the win/win situation here? Also - we also appear to have some odd location/destination pages ranking high in the SERPS. In other words, locations that don't appear to be from one of Google's data center. No idea why this might be happening. Suggestions?

To add to EGOL's good point, I'd add a viewing can be considered a "microconversion." The metrics you might positively affect are time on site, and if it opens in a shadowbox, potentially lower bounce rate.

When you say "meme" I think of something organic such as a funny or slightly odd photo or image, which serves as a canvas upon which others paint their creativity. There's no telling how one bad cartoon became "Pin ALL the Things!" or pic of a guy with his hat turned to the side became "Scumbag Steve" or an insane wolf became this wild and crazy reused advice image, or socially awkward penguin.

Reading what you're describing, it looks more like you're interested in a tag line, or a campaign concept, or am I misreading?

If you want a funny organic image, I'd try and get rights to an image of a girl scout or boy scout with a hundred badges, or some nerdy fellow in a weird location with a hundred unrelated patches on his jacket, maybe foursquare badges. Then let the crowd come up with why it's funny.

Some questions:

1. The headline says "creating backlinks" but your question seems to be about content creation. Do you have a clear keyword goal in mind for the blog?

2. Will the Typepad blog be hosted internally within website architecture or will it live completely externally on the *.typepad.com RD? If the latter, how will content creation drive SEO value to your client's core business  site? What is your goal with the Typepad blog: to create inbound links to the law firm's website, or to generate leads via blog content?

Brian

PS: your job goes far beyond riding them to create content: you have to give them clear business reasons why they need to do it, what the expected result is, where the value lies. As lawyers they have liabilities if they give legal advice on a blog, and they can't risk offending potential clients or speaking on certain topics if it entails a conflict of interest. There is no harder industry to blog for than the legal profession, and most lawyers are not professional copywriters.

What Adrian said. The Open Graph is "a way to link these." This question should be marked as "Answered."

Some questions:

1. The headline says "creating backlinks" but your question seems to be about content creation. Do you have a clear keyword goal in mind for the blog?

2. Will the Typepad blog be hosted internally within website architecture or will it live completely externally on the *.typepad.com RD? If the latter, how will content creation drive SEO value to your client's core business  site? What is your goal with the Typepad blog: to create inbound links to the law firm's website, or to generate leads via blog content?

Brian

PS: your job goes far beyond riding them to create content: you have to give them clear business reasons why they need to do it, what the expected result is, where the value lies. As lawyers they have liabilities if they give legal advice on a blog, and they can't risk offending potential clients or speaking on certain topics if it entails a conflict of interest. There is no harder industry to blog for than the legal profession, and most lawyers are not professional copywriters.

I work for a business that operates several sites that were developed a very long time ago. We've been making many different changes over the past 12-18 months to improve these sites in several different ways. One area that we've never discussed or attempted is general site structure. Its pretty obvious that when the business was started they had never heard of information architecture or usability design. To make matters worse, the internal linking strategy appears to have been link everything to everything. Well after being told that it couldn't be done - I'm getting our team to say we must focus on this, if for no other reason that to help consumers figure out how to navigate through our site.

Today we essentially have a series of category / information pages. In some cases, we hang more detailed topical content related to a category /informational page in a hub and spoke manner.  Although remember what I said about linking everything to everything. In reality there are a series of subtopics that should been designed for every category / informational area. Instead, what happened is in some cases the subtopic is integrated into the hub or category page, in other situations is hung off the page as a spoke page and in others the subtopic isn't even covered.

The plan is to standardize - each category will have 'n' subtopics (~10-12, we're still working this out). From a navigational standpoint users will be able to easily navigate both across categories as well as subtopics within a category as well as between categories within adjacent/similar subtopics. This is essentially a grid if that makes sense.

The question is this - we have some keywords that do well in SEO and many many more that do not and the trend has not been our friend. We're considering keeping the URLs of the pages associated with strong keywords the same within the nav structure, even though this might mean the URL for a spoke page will be inconsistent with the spoke page name from a different category.

I don't see any real danger for pages that either are not associated with any ranking keywords or only very weak keywords. Maybe I'm wrong.

What things should we consider in this change? We believe that this standardization should help consumers find the information they are looking for in a much more efficient manner, so page views/visit should go up. Additionally, this prepares us for category and subtopic comparison pages and other added functionality being added in a logical manner. We also think that as we add depth about a subtopic, it will be easier for us to acquire links to our site because the subtopics within a category will appeal to different websites. This is by no means a small project. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Do folks think this is a worthwhile endeavor? We've spent a lot of time cleaning up H1 tags, structure of our pages, anchor tags, page load order and speed, image caching, etc. Site structure, URL length and internal link structure are essentially what is left. Once these are done we intend to really get going on better and more organized content on our site. Thoughts?

When you say "meme" I think of something organic such as a funny or slightly odd photo or image, which serves as a canvas upon which others paint their creativity. There's no telling how one bad cartoon became "Pin ALL the Things!" or pic of a guy with his hat turned to the side became "Scumbag Steve" or an insane wolf became this wild and crazy reused advice image, or socially awkward penguin.

Reading what you're describing, it looks more like you're interested in a tag line, or a campaign concept, or am I misreading?

If you want a funny organic image, I'd try and get rights to an image of a girl scout or boy scout with a hundred badges, or some nerdy fellow in a weird location with a hundred unrelated patches on his jacket, maybe foursquare badges. Then let the crowd come up with why it's funny.